Black and grey scrollwork tattoo with a solid black loop motif on the side of a hip, shown on a person in a pink top and dark leggings.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black heart and scrollwork on a hip

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black motif with two loops sits at the centre of a design of grey shaded scrolls and curling filigree. The linework is soft and the shading gives the scrolls depth, with faint shadows at the edges. The tattoo fills the middle of the frame against a pale skin tone, with a studio bench and bag visible in the background.

Other Heart Scroll Filigree Swirl Loop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud Harrowby had been hammering the same curl of iron for three days, because the ruined chapel at Carrowmere wanted its gate back before the wedding season and the old scroll had rusted to a lace nobody could copy. She had the forge lit at five and the bellows going by six, and the dog at her heel refused to leave the shade of the yew.

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The Lord's agent came up the lane on Thursday with a folded drawing and a face like wet slate. He wanted a heart at the centre of the gate, pierced through with a double loop, the way the old masons had carved it over the lintel before the roof fell in. Maud had seen that carving once, as a girl, when the stone still held its colour. She told him the heart would take a week. He told her the castle had waited four hundred years and could wait another.

She cut the heart from a flat bar, heated it white, and folded it on the anvil until its two loops met. Then she filed the edges black. It was the blackest thing she had ever made. The scrolls she let run in grey, tapering from the centre outwards, each one thinner than a fingernail, so that when the gate hung in the morning light the shadows would fall soft on the stones behind it.

On the last evening she hung it on its hinges at the broken arch. The agent did not come. Instead a woman in a grey coat walked up from the village, laid her palm flat against the middle of the heart, and said the key had never gone into the lock at all. Her grandmother had hidden it in the chapel wall. Maud fetched a lamp. Behind the ivy, the old keyhole was waiting, exactly where the loops pointed.